Rob’s question illustrates the problem. Why should anti-Semitism among Southern Baptists or skinheads justify anti-Semitism amongst liberals?
As a Jew, I see 3 kinds of anti-Semitism common amongst my liberal friends.
The first is the common expression “I am not an anti-semite, I am an anti-Zionist!” As a fervent believer that the Palestinians are my brothers and sisters, this comment makes me very angry. Zionism was never intended to be antagonistic to the indigenous Arab population. It was the Arabs, not the Jews, who attempted to create ethnic cleansing after World War II. It is all too easy for liberals to forget that the grand mufti of Jerusalem was a Nazi. It is also much too easy to forgive the crimes against Jews in Arab countries, countries that treated us as less than human. before Israel provided a new home.
Make no mistake, being a Zionist does not mean unquestioning support of Israel’s government. However, when I hear liberals say that they are anti-Zionist. I want to ask where would they have the Jewish people go? Should my Ethiopian brothers and sisters return to their status as “Falasha?” Should my Russian brothers and sisters have stayed in Russia where we were deprived of the quality of education? Should Yemeni Jews return to a country where the very word for Jew is an obscenity? Or would you have the Israelis live in places like Iraq or Iran, where our schools may not teach Hebrew and the headmaster must be muslim?
My second variation on the theme of liberal antisemtism i sthe way we are shown in the media. In the 60 years since my family bought its first television set, the images I can remember of Jews ranged from Molly Goldberg and Milton Berle to Seinfeld. Despite our great success in in this country, the Jewish family is only shown as successful when it intermarries. Jewish heroes, whether that be Brandeis, Polinsky, Gompers, Salk, are never identified by their Jewish origins. Few of my Jewish friends, for that matter, are willing or able to show pride in the family traditions that led to their success. Rather than celebrating our tradition, most Jews put themselves forward like Seinfeld… as cultural Jews.
The third form of liberal anti-Semitism is the picture of us as “white.” To put the American Jew in the white basket is to imply that being white is the antonym of being black. Jewish culture, so when the culture I grew up with, has very little to do with majority white culture. While that has changed over my lifetime, the change for Jews is not all that different for the change that is occurred for middle-class African-Americans. Moreover, by painting us with a white brush, non-Jewish liberals benefit from sharing the guilt of their culture. While, as an American, I believe that I share the guilt for slavery and for extermination of the Native American, I see that shared guilt as part of my responsibility as an American, not as a “white person.”